To Hell You Ride, a comic book by Lance Henriksen

Hey fellas, you know how you like comic strips and all that? And you know how you are also a huge fan of Lance Henriksen from ALIENS, STONE COLD, HARD TARGET, THE QUICK AND THE DEAD, PISTOL WHIPPED, the TV show Millennium, and others? Well that’s interesting because Joseph Maddrey, co-writer of the Henriksen autobiography Not Bad For a Human, dropped me a line to let me know that he and Henriksen have written To Hell You Ride, a 5-issue comic series for Dark Horse Comics. The first issue comes out December 12th.

I got to read the first issue, and it’s intriguing so far. It takes place in Colorado, with flashbacks to two different time periods and explaining how a ritual-gone-wrong by an unspecified Native American tribe in 1881 reverberates into the present and the life of a young troublemaker named Two-Dogs. There’s a sheriff character who seems to be drawn to look like Henriksen, but that didn’t stop me from imagining his voice as the third person omniscient narrator.

Joseph says this is a story that came to Henriksen about 30 years ago when he first visited Telluride. He wrote it up as a screenplay in the early ’90s, at that time centering on the sheriff character, but it’s since evolved into this Two-Dogs story they’re telling now. The artist is named Tom Mandrake and I like his drawings. At times very moody and cinematic. There are some cool ideas in regards to how the ritual works. A good start to the story.

And I just now got that “to hell you ride” sounds like “Telluride.”

And oh shit, it comes out on 12-12-12. I wonder if it’s a sequel to the movie 11-11-11?

VERN has been reviewing movies since 1999 and is the author of the books SEAGALOGY: A STUDY OF THE ASS-KICKING FILMS OF STEVEN SEAGAL, YIPPEE KI-YAY MOVIEGOER!: WRITINGS ON BRUCE WILLIS, BADASS CINEMA AND OTHER IMPORTANT TOPICS and NIKETOWN: A NOVEL. His horror-action novel WORM ON A HOOK will arrive later this year.

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Scalped and Brubaker’s stuff are great badass funny books. I believe that Scalped has wrapped up recently (although I haven’t picked up the final collection). The hard boiled fiction is probably my favorite genre of comics. I also really enjoy 100 Bullets, although I also haven’t gotten to the end of that series. It’s a shame that superheroes have become the sole face of the comic book industry, since they really offer something for everyone, or at least in an ideal world they would.

Being that Vern seems fond of uncompromising westerns I think he will really get a kick out of PREACHER. Henriksen penning a comic book is simultaneously one of the greatest and most bizarre things I’ve ever read. I’ll keep my eye out for this when visiting my LCS this weekend.

I don’t know. PREACHER is probably my favorite comic ever, but I can see Vern being turned off by Ennis’ childish “I’m really shocking the pants off you right now, aren’t I?” attitude. There’s a lot of legitimate heart and badassery in there that he’d like if he stuck with it, but he’d have to get through Arseface first, which I can’t see him doing, quite frankly.

Yeah, I do love PREACHER, but I think its time has passed. It does some things very well (the relationships between the Cassidy, Tulip and Jesse are some of the best written in comics) but its juvenile edginess hasn’t aged well. What seemed incredibly audacious for a comic back then is commonplace now. PUNISHER MAX might be a better fit, especially since PUNISHER WAR ZONE is such a favourite around here, but even then I think Ennis’ style might rub Vern the wrong way. That’s why I recommend CRIMINAL. No bullshit, no cartoony neo-noir like SIN CITY, just straight-forward, bad-ass crime stories.

100 BULLETS is good too, good call RBatty, but personally I became progressively less interested in it as it became more about The Trust. I liked it better when it was this mysterious dude giving people a gun and an opportunity for revenge.

I’ve read the first volume of Scalped recently and quite enjoyed it. It would make a decent TV show, I think. Kinda reminded me of Justified, for some reason.

Have any of you read this series called Northlanders? It’s supposed to be excellent, but I haven’t had the chance to give it a shot yet? So little time these days, I have to be really selective about what I read.

Best comic book series I’ve read in years is Age of Bronze by Eric Shanower. Started reading it thinking it’s gonna be some Prince Valiant-type shit and was very surprised by how caught up I got in all that Trojan War history, politics and melodrama. Been waiting years for that 4th volume.

I’ve read the first trade of Northlanders and was a little surprised at how much I liked it. I thought it might be Brian Wood’s hipster version of vikings but I don’t remember the dialogue to be too anachronistic or annoying or anything. I’ll have to get the rest.